I recently read the following article which discusses SSRI’s (“Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors”) and changing conceptions and attitudes towards depression:
Talking Back to Prozac
By Frederick C. Crews
I do not have any personal experience with SSRI’s such as Prozac, but I confess that I am (and already was before reading the article) skeptical of their broad and seemingly unquestioned application. Although I could be wrong, I suspect that this skeptical view is more or less shared by most fairly unbiased people, even if the details of where and when a prescription of an SSRI as acceptable according to scientific and human standards can be questioned and debated.
I’m wondering a couple things:
One - Are there people here who would express a more radical view (i.e. that SSRI’s are ‘the answer’ or that they are ‘evil’).
Two - Do people here find the subject of the article (pharmaceutical ‘answers’ to psycho-physical ‘problems’) as strikingly relevant as I do? For me this article touched on many of the themes I see being discussed here on this site every day - in fact in such a way that I am unsure where to post it: Philosophy? Social Sciences? Psychology? Natural Science? Religion?
It is my experience that people (myself included of course) seem to be always engaged in a continuous effort to avoid their lives. That statement could be understood in a thousand different ways I’d guess, depending on who is saying it and to what purpose – to a large extent (though not exclusively) since I call myself a Buddhist I am coming at it from a Buddhist point of view, which is to say that people tend to try their best to avoid what they do not like, pull towards themselves what they are attracted to, and ignore what they consider to be irrelevant to their personal world. In Buddhism these attitudes are labeled ‘the three poisons’ (attachment, aversion, and ignorance) and are related to a general overall attitude towards life that is conceptualized as preoccupation with and obsession with ‘the eight worldly concerns’: gain and loss, honor and dishonor, praise and blame, and pleasure and pain. So the growing use of SSRI’s to help effect these ‘worldly’ goals comes as no surprise. Further, it doesn’t seem necessary to posit any sort of ultimate conspiracy theory in order to make sense of the phenomena, regardless of whether or not willful deceptions and manipulation of facts can be proved to be at work. Finally, since I have brought Buddhism into this picture, I should point out that ‘worldly’ in Buddhism does not equate with ‘sinful’. It is not considered wrong to utilize drugs if they are immediately helpful, although their helpfulness may be highly doubtful.
So what I am asserting is that the use of SSRI’s, although possibly helpful in some situations, should be seen at the very least as just one more way that we as human beings try to keep suffering at bay, by pretending that we can ‘take a right turn’ and somehow avoid it as if it is simply a puddle on the sidewalk. Television, movies, alcohol, relationships, religion, sex, the internet, the company of friends, the avoidance of other people… although not inherently problematic these things tend to become habitual crutches that we depend on daily in order to avoid facing our existential situation.
Comments?
SSRI’s on the other hand are said to be very potent drugs with major known side effects. I don’t have a history of depression though, so I’m sure that fact predisposes me to my more skeptical view.